Executions

Shedding new light on a long-suppressed chapter of the Korean War, a government commission acknowledged Thursday that South Korean soldiers and police executed about 5,000 suspected North Korean sympathizers during the early months of the conflict. In the first acknowledgment of the death toll, the so-called Truth and Reconciliation Commission said South Korean authorities rounded up and massacred at least 4,934 civilians during the summer of 1950. Evidence of the atrocities was hidden for decades under the military-backed authoritarian regimes that ruled South Korea until the nation embraced democracy in the 1980s.

Last-minute court appeals rejected and clemency vigorously denied by the governor, Donald Beardslee was executed early this morning, 24 years after he confessed to the slayings of two Bay Area women. As about 300 opponents of the death penalty held a vigil outside the prison, Beardslee, 61, was strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal cocktail of drugs. In an extraordinarily detailed statement Tuesday, Gov.

Colombian soldiers are executing an increasing number of peasants in rural areas and passing them off as leftist rebels killed in combat, a human rights study found. There have been 955 documented cases of illegal executions by the army over the last five years, compared with 577 in the previous five, according to the International Observation Mission on Extrajudicial Executions and Impunity in Colombia.

Military firing squads executed 21 people in Kinshasa on Tuesday on charges of murder and armed robbery, state radio and witnesses reported. The executions, which were open to the public, were the first mass executions in the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo since President Laurent Kabila toppled veteran Zairian dictator Mobutu Sese Seko in May.

County supervisors voted 4 to 1 Tuesday for a nonbinding resolution asking Gov. Gray Davis to place a moratorium on executions. The county joined San Francisco, Menlo Park, Oakland, Berkeley and Santa Cruz in calling for a freeze on executions until studies on fairness in sentencing and the risk of executing innocent people were completed.

The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has ordered Trinidad and Tobago to abort the planned hangings of five prisoners this month, said Trinidad's foreign minister. The five condemned killers are among 105 prisoners on death row at the state prison. Trinidad, a republic in the southern Caribbean, has recently moved to speed up executions in response to local sentiment, drawing a wave of condemnation from international human rights groups.

Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment, is set to carry out only its third multiple execution next month by putting to death two convicted murderers on the same night, officials said. Barring intervention by the courts or Gov. George W. Bush, Brian Roberson, 36, and Oliver Cruz, 33, will die by injection in separate executions on Aug. 9 at the state prison in Huntsville.

Executions and new death sentences continued their nationwide decline in 2008, as states wrestled with legal, moral and financial concerns about capital punishment. Thirty-seven people were executed in nine states, the lowest total in 14 years and a 62% drop from the 98 death sentences carried out in 1999, according to statistics compiled by the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

Protesting his innocence and pleading for mercy, a Palestinian police colonel was executed by firing squad in the Gaza Strip after being convicted of kidnapping and raping a 5-year-old boy. The execution, the third in the autonomous Palestinian areas in six months, raised concern among human rights activists that the punishment would be applied frequently.

Killer Donald Beardslee will be executed early Wednesday barring decisions in his favor from last-minute appeals or Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's granting of clemency. At one minute after midnight Wednesday, San Quentin State Prison authorities are scheduled to execute Beardslee by lethal injection. Beardslee's lawyers claim he suffers from brain maladies that prevented him from thinking clearly when he killed Stacey Benjamin, 19, and Patty Geddling, 23, in 1981.